Zapraszamy na wykład w serii IAS Invited Lecture Series in Materialty of (Post)socialism. Wykład otwarty odbędzie się 23 listopada 2021 roku na platformie MS Teams. Spotkanie rozpocznie się o godzinie 18.00. Wykład w języku angielskim Architecture in the World Socialist System: Designing and Building Baghdad wygłosi Łukasz Stanek.
Abstract:
This talk proposes an alternative genealogy of architecture’s globalization during the Cold War as seen through the lens of the World Socialist System. Rather than a utopia or an ideology, I will discuss the World Socialist System as a specific political economy which shaped the circulation of design and construction practices between Eastern European socialist countries and countries in Africa and Asia. I will show how such features of this political economy as the inconvertibility of Eastern European currencies and barter agreements impacted the programs, layouts, technologies, and materiality of urbanisation processes in Baghdad between the coup of Qasim (1958) and the first Gulf war (1991).
Bio:
Łukasz Stanek is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the Manchester School of Architecture, The University of Manchester, UK. Currently Stanek studies the Africanization of Ghanaian Architecture, as part of the Centring Africa Program at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Besides Manchester, Stanek taught at the ETH Zurich, Harvard University GSD, and the University of Michigan.
Stanek authored Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2020).